Set after the first game, The Revolution sees you step into the shoes of Ethan Brady, a blank page of a character recruited by the Resistance, a group of Guerrilla fighters attempting to take America back from the hands of her North Korean occupiers. It’s painfully generic at times, which would be forgivable if the quality were sufficiently high, but it suffers there, too.
The original game, for its faults, had a fairly decent storyline and at least felt different to what was around at the time. Usually I’m a bit of an apologist (read anything I wrote about Destiny last year), but there are certain things you can’t easily turn a blind eye to, and so many of them are featured in The Revolution. This wasn’t my first alarm bell when playing Homefront: The Revolution – that came during the mean-spirited, gratuitously violent opening cutscene – but it was the first one that made me say “Oh. Beyond saving the devs a bit of time and money, it’s actually a bit of a stupid conceit. But when someone thinks you’re a Korean spy in a futuristic, totalitarian Philadelphia and believes it with such vehemence that she’s willing to cut your actual nipples off, being a silent protagonist makes absolutely zero sense.
Silent protagonists have their place, right? In an RPG for example, where you’ve got dialogue choices to make up for it, or maybe in BioShock where you’re essentially a tool for the bad guy for the entire game and you don’t ever really need to talk to anyone.